Venice
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Venice 2014: ‘Messi’ review
★☆☆☆☆ Messi (2014), a new film about diminutive Argentinian football icon Lionel Messi, has all the ingredients for a great sports documentary. A mass of archive material has been made available to director Álex de la Iglesia, apparently provided by Messi’s constantly videotaping father, there are interviews with influential figures in the player’s life including…
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Venice 2014: Read our Venezia 71 programme preview
This week, the world’s oldest and often most unpredictable film festival, the 71st Venice Film Festival, will unroll on the Lido. Twenty films will screen in competition, vying for the prestigious Golden Lion and a further fifty-odd films will show out of competition and in the various sidebars – all but one of which will…
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Cannes 2014: ‘Insecure’ review
★★☆☆☆ Adèle Exarchopoulos’ return to Cannes following Blue Is the Warmest Colour’s Palme d’Or win might be the headline from Marianne Tardieu’s French thriller Insecure (2014), but the film itself sadly doesn’t reach the promise of what its star might attract. Exarchopoulos is, in fact, only in a handful of scenes, as we follow the…
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Cannes 2014: ‘Mr. Turner’ preview
Along with fellow British veteran Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall, Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner (2014) will be in the running for the coveted Palme d’Or in the next fortnight. A biopic of Victorian painter J.M.W. Turner, the film stars Timothy Spall as the famed painter alongside Dorothy Atkinson, Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson. Leigh’s previous foray…
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Venice 2013: ‘Sacro GRA’ wins the Golden Lion
The Venice Golden Lion returned to the host country after fifteen years this evening with Gianfranco Rosi’s biography of a Rome ring road, Sacro GRA, picking up the festival’s top prize. Renowned director Bernardo Bertolucci and his jury plumped for high arthouse cinema over the more crowd-pleasing fare of Stephen Frears’ British offering Philomena, which…
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Venice 2013: ‘Memphis’ review
★★★☆☆ Timothy Sutton’s second film, Memphis (2013) – in show at this year’s Venice Film Festival – is a meditation into music, “God-given” talent and madness starring and scored by Willis Earl Beal. Beal, a fascinating compelling presence, is first seen looking a bit lost in a TV studio. “I thought it was going to…
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Venice 2013: ‘Stray Dogs’ review
★★☆☆☆ Tsai Ming-liang, joint-winner of the 1994 Golden Lion for Vive L’Amour, returns to Venice with new film Stray Dogs (2013), a motionless motion picture which may challenge even the hardiest arthouse advocates with its tale of a family living on the edge of poverty in Taiwan. Lee Kang-sheng plays a man living on the…
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Venice 2013: ‘The Sacrament’ review
★★☆☆☆ Part of a new generation of young horror directors, Ti West arrives in Venice with The Sacrament (2013), a found-footage frightener based loosely on the true events of the Jonestown Massacre of 1978. Updating the story, West has a trio of filmmakers – Sam (A.J. Bowen), Jake (Joe Swanberg) and Patrick (Kentucker Audley), from…
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Venice 2013: ‘Ruin’ review
★★★★☆ Showing in the Orizzonti sidebar at the 70th Venice Film Festival, Ruin (2013) is by turns a gritty and dazzling lovers-on-the-run tale set in modern day Cambodia. Directed by Michael Cody and Amiel Courtin-Wilson, the film tells the story of two of society’s worst-off down-and-outs. Sang Malen plays Sovanna, a young prostitute who is…
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Venice 2013: ‘Gravity’ review
★★★★★ The opening film of the 70th Venice Film Festival is Alfonso Cuaròn’s sci-fi blockbuster Gravity (2013), featuring Lido regular George Clooney and Sandra Bullock as two astronauts cast adrift in space when their shuttle is struck by satellite debris. Cuaròn has had something of a directing hiatus of late – his last film, Children…